Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

My driver heard me, though. He was a Marine. I caught his sardonic smile in the mirror.

I wondered how many men we might find in that grave. No one had given me the details. The grave could have been huge or small.

We drove away from the coast and into the jungle, trading bright sun for dappled light and shadows. Following a guidance signal from the site, we turned down a dirt path that led through trampled plants and into heavy undergrowth. The road led us through a maze of broad-leafed plants that looked like bloodred banana trees, vines, bamboo, and tall trees with wide trunks.

“It’s going to get bumpy from here, sir,” my driver said. Hearing this, Cabot sighed and slumped back in his seat.

Fortunately, we had a heavy troop mobile ahead of us. The big truck bashed all obstacles out of its way. It slowed and took turns wide, practically paving the path for us. We bounced along for another fifteen miles before we reached a clearing in which men in fatigues prowled a low ridge.

The first man to reach my car wore an air filter over his nose and mouth. He pulled it off, and said, “General, you will probably want to stay in your car unless you have an oxygen mask.”

When I asked, “That bad?” the man simply nodded.

“Poisonous or just smelly?” I asked.

“Reeking,” he said.

“I hate this shit,” I said as I climbed from the car. I would not like what I saw, but I’d seen death and decay before. Over the last ten years, I’d lost my emotional virginity.

The steamy air hit my chest like a hammer, and blood rushed to my head as I adjusted to the heat. There was not so much as a breeze in this blasted hellhole. The leaves on the plants sat so still they might have been painted on, and the flies were everywhere. They filled the air, their buzzing so strong it sounded electronic.

The men near the grave wore jumpsuits that were wet and soiled. They wore full face masks with clear hoods over their ears, hair, and necks.

The air smelled bad, sweet and putrid at the same time. I recognized the scent of rotting bodies in the liquid air. I also smelled the acrid scent of vomit. Whatever they had seen had left seasoned men sick.

The pit was twenty feet long, no more than six feet wide, and shallow. A small silver canister lay on the ground beside it. The word NOXIUM ran down the length of both sides.

Suddenly, looking into that pit was the last thing I wanted to do. Thinking of a long-ago battle on a distant planet in which scores of men had been killed with Noxium, I wanted to return to the air-conditioned comfort of the police station. I wanted to put on a pair of mediaLink glasses and read a good book, maybe something philosophical or religious …something that explained the meaning of life.

There were no bodies inside the grave, not even so much as a human finger. What I saw was a writhing carpet of pearly white maggots feeding in the flesh-colored soup that might once have been forty or fifty men. Soggy uniforms lay in the mix along with boots, belts, and weapons.

“Quarantine the solar system? You mean blockade it, right?”

“You already have a blockade, and it didn’t work,” I said. “It didn’t keep the bad guys out; but that’s not the problem now. Now we want to keep the bad guys in.”

“We haven’t caught anyone running our blockade,” said Captain Tom Wesker, commander of the fleet Warshaw had assigned to guard St. Augustine.

Something about Wesker; he was a defensive speck.

“That makes sense,” I said.

“What’s that?” He sounded nervous.

“It makes sense that you haven’t seen them running your blockade. If you had seen them, you might have caught them, and we wouldn’t have five hundred dead clones on our hands.”

“That’s not fair! We’ve only been here two months. Maybe they got here before we did,” Wesker whined like a little kid.

“Good point,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. On the other hand, Warshaw had only liberated St. Augustine three months ago. “Unless the enemy landed during the alien occupation, they pretty much had to have arrived on your watch.”

I decided to make things easy on him. “Look at it this way. You should have an easier time keeping ships on the planet than you did chasing them away; it gives you a smaller area to patrol.”

He wanted to tell me that was bullshit, but he knew better. He was a captain, I was a three-star; if he pissed me off, I’d have him scrubbing toilets for life. He took a deep breath, drank back his anger, and asked, “What are you trying to keep on the planet?”

“The same people we wanted to keep off the planet for the last two months,” I said.

“Who exactly is that?” he asked, his frustration so close to the surface his eyes twitched.

“If I knew who the speck they were, don’t you think I’d arrest them?” I asked. “I can tell you this much, they look like us, they talk like us, and they kill senior officers. If I were you, I’d do everything in my power to keep them on the ground, you know, as if the planet were under quarantine.”

“Yes, sir. Understood, sir.”

“Also, put every available man on security at all times,” I said.

“On the planet?”

“On your ships. I’m betting you’ve already been infiltrated.”

I had traveled from Gobi to St. Augustine on a battleship with a crew of 1,800 enlisted men and 150 officers. I returned on a frigate, a small ship with a crew of 170 men. I felt like I was rowing home on a dinghy.

The man I had seen in the restaurant looked like he might have been in his midtwenties, making him slightly on the young side for the Enlisted Man’s Navy. We hadn’t seen a new cadet since the Mogats destroyed the clone farms six years ago. Our youngest clones were twenty-four, and most of our men were in their thirties.

One of the benefits of flying in a frigate was that the ship was so small I could assemble my own crew. I had undoubtedly assembled the oldest crew in the short history of the Enlisted Man’s Navy. By the time I finished, the youngest man on the ship was in his early forties. It was possible that some infiltrator might have stowed away aboard the ship, but he would stand out once he left his hidey-hole.

Why had I hesitated before going after that bastard at Scrubb’s? Even if I’d had to kill him, we might have found something to go on. The autopsy might have provided clues about how we could identify the infiltrators. And maybe I would not have had to kill him. With any luck, I might have captured him alive with nothing worse than a broken leg or spine.

On the frigate, my quarters were both my billet and my stateroom. It didn’t matter much. My time on the ship was short. We spent fifteen minutes traveling untold trillions of miles and then another two hours circling Gobi as I considered my options and decided where I should go and what I should do.

Someone knocked on my door, and I knew who it was. When I opened the door, Admiral J. Winston Cabot saluted and asked for permission to enter. I did not like the guy. I would dump him when I got the chance. I had already abandoned half my entourage on St. Augustine.

I asked him in.

“Did you send for me, sir?” Cabot asked. It must have galled him, calling me “sir.” He was nearly twice my age, and he had reached the rank of admiral. Once you obtain a certain rank, you expect to leave the sirs and salutes behind.

“Have a seat,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Let’s forget the senior officer stuff for now,” I said.

Cabot nodded and quietly sat down. He had aged well. He had plenty of white in his hair, but he had neither put on pounds nor turned frail after fifty. He looked fit, like a man who runs five or six miles every day.